Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Toronto

Twitter is a Mall

jstuart — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:19:37 +0000

Hamilton Stephanie Ross from York University and Peter Sawchuck from University of Toronto had invited me to be the first speaker to discuss organizing with a group of academics and activists coming together on a 5-year project called APCOL: Anti-Poverty Community Organizing and Learning, a collaborative effort to evaluate how organizations approach issues and campaigns and use popular education. The project is fascinating and it will be interesting to see how it progresses and what conclusions it draws over the years, but right now it was interesting for the discussion it allowed about organizing and the challenges before us.

Let me share just one piece of the richness of the exchange initiated by a caution and comment by one participant, Jesse Hirsh, when we wandered into the area of whether or not new social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter might play a role in popular education for members and leadership development in mass-based organizations. Hirsh had seen a poster for the discussion and popped in to see what it was all about, but after introducing himself as someone who worried and thought about these issues, as many of us do, indicated his skepticism about the tools. He started making his point by noting how difficult it had been for organizations and activists to get access to the modern flashpoints of concentration like malls. We laughed at the times we had all tried, been turned away, arrested, and what not. He then observed sharply that “Twitter is a mall!”

Without explaining he had made his point. Twitter is a huge mass of blurbs and belches of words and information streamed along a vast aisle where we walk and run or turn away in dismay unable to figure out whether to go in and shop or keep walking and gawking. Learning to use such a tool to actually organize poses challenges and even more so figuring out a way to jump into the torrent and vastness of this mall-like world is something that none of us have grasped successfully.

Worse, we have not even really figured out how to make it a two-way or multiple communication tool. Comments on Facebook at least are a sign of life in the universe. The twitter-verse is still mainly small shouts without much recognition of what is being heard much less how to move forward and participate.

Note to self: much work to be done!

Tamil Tactics in Toronto

jstuart — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:09:06 +0000

New Orleans A classic organizing problem has always been how do popular forces leverage local strength around global concerns? This question has always been difficult as anti-war forces saw most recently in trying to raise issues around Iraq and as 60’s veterans vividly remember from the protests to stop the Viet Nam war a world away in Southeast Asia. We are seeing this fight play out in a dramatic and interesting fashion right now in Toronto.

The Tamil community in Toronto is reportedly the second largest in the world after Chennai and southern India itself. The community has mobilized recently in a desperate life-and-death struggle to try to leverage its size in Toronto to force the Canadian government not to allow the Sri Lankan army to inflict genocide on the Tamil civilians caught in the crossfire in this country as the government bears down in its drive to wipe out the last vestiges of the long civil war in that country fought with the so-called Tamil Tigers. The United Nations

reported over the last 24 hours that somewhere between 378 and 1000 civilians were killed in this squeeze in recent days in a combination of the government attack and the guerilla utilization of civilians as human shields.

The Toronto Tamil community with relatives throughout the war zone has been engaged in one mobilization after another in an attempt to force the issue to the front of the pile for the conservative Canadian federal government. Most dramatically on Sunday after a long protest featuring yet more street blocking (which for decades has been one of my favorite and most effective tactics in countless campaigns), protestors left the area around Union Station’s train hub and block the expressway going through downtown Toronto hear the Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays play. They were immediately set upon by all manner of police and SWAT teams in a standoff that blocked the expressway for hours. [James Wardlaw, head organizer of ACORN Canada in Hamilton, brought all of this to my attention since he was caught on a bus and stranded for hours trying to get from Newmarket back down to Hamilton.]

In the Canadian multi-party system, the Tamil tactics have garnered support from the Liberal Party (which is not that liberal) that is pushing the governing party hard, and trying to cement its immigrant base in Ontario. The government has not formally moved to intervene.

News seems suppressed and spotty on these major actions around another war that is halfway around the globe, but all of this is worth careful watching not only because it is important and lives are at stake, but also because the Toronto Tamil community may be teaching all of us a master course in effective global organizing utilizing the local leverage you have available.

Maybe a Canadian?

wade — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:21:39 +0000

Toronto   The federal government in Canada recently passed legislation clearing up the fact that among other things children born in Canada or to Canadians outside of Canada are still Canada which is likely to confer citizenship on more than 300,000 folks who don’t realize they are really Canadians. There is a publicity campaign underway, including a spot on YouTube, that brings some humor the search and has someone suddenly waking up and finding out that they are Canadian. They are wrapped in maple leaf blankets and find a couple of moose, a hockey player, and a Royal Mountie standing looming over their bedroom.
   This is a different approach to immigration than one I see so often. The difference is refreshing.
   The ACORN Canada office in Toronto reflects the same kind of diversity that I find throughout this wildly cosmopolitan city. We have staff with roots in India, Tajikistan, Argentina, Tanzania, and, hey, even the US. Almost no one on staff is actually from Toronto with even the Canadians from here and there.
   It breeds a different perspective on both how integrated people are with people around the world, but also the fact that people around the world are as important perhaps as Canadians. That’s not a south of the border worldview, eh?
   I found myself trudging on train and bus the short haul to one of the neighborhoods through a cold, sloppy rain yesterday afternoon with one of the organizers for an opportunity to visit one of the local group leaders. Elise Aymer had not only listened to our organizing rhetoric and ideology about membership participation and direction, but had also absorbed the insight from her own experience in project management for tech companies that the organizers simply couldn’t do “it all” even if they wanted to, and needed the members to not only pull their load, but in fact to deeply help in recruiting other members with special strengths, volunteers, interns, and any and all available labor to make the organization able to build the capacity to realize its objectives. From that insight she was carving out her contribution from her home with her growing family. This meeting that started as simply another chance to see a member turned out to be a gift and inspiration. In less than an hour it felt like I was walking out on the puddles as if strolling on water with the feeling that anything might just be possible and being reminded even after 40 years of organizing why I continue to believe, sometimes in spite of the evidence, that our eventual victories are inevitable, if we can only marshal all of the latent capacity of our people and their unimaginable collective strengths.
   Maybe we’re all Canadians now?
Watch the Utube video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDeDQpIQFD0